Legacy:Trystan/11 17 02a

11/17/02 Breaking Down Actor.uc

Actor.uc is the base object for all "gameplay objects." The name makes most people assume that it's the base class for all "living" or "large movable" objects but that's not true. Bullets, guns, health packs, adrenaline – these are all derivations of Actor.

The header comment in Actor.uc says it all:

//=============================================================================
// Actor: The base class of all actors.
// Actor is the base class of all gameplay objects.  
// A large number of properties, behaviors and interfaces are implemented in Actor, including:
//
// -	Display 
// -	Animation
// -	Physics and world interaction
// -	Making sounds
// -	Networking properties
// -	Actor creation and destruction
// -	Triggering and timers
// -	Actor iterator functions
// -	Message broadcasting
//
// This is a built-in Unreal class and it shouldn't be modified.
//=============================================================================

Pay attention class! The Actor class is one of the most important and fundamental classes in UT2K3 from what I can see. Actor derives from Object so all of the functions and data available to Object are also available to Actor.

We start, as most of the original code does, with enumerations. ELightType and ELightEffect are defined at the beginning of this file. ELightType specifies what type of light it is: is it blinking? is it the sun of the local star system? ELightEffect specifies how the light is affected. Subtle difference. You can have a pulsing light that wavers.

to be continued after sleep

I should finish this someday. :)